The 10,000 hours theory? I bet it's true. You need to practice if you hope to do something well, and writing is no exception. Getting better at writing takes time.

It means spending perfectly nice afternoons alone at your keyboard. It means squeezing words out of your brain while pretending there's nothing interesting to look at on the Internet. It means forgoing fun, family and your Netflix queue to create something that, in the end, your spouse and your writing group might be the only ones to read.

Writing is hard, solitary work with no promise of payoff. But stories are important, to me and to others, and I suppose that's why I keep at it.

Last summer, I reformatted an older project, FINDING FUNBOY, for Amazon's Kindle. It's in the lending library, so if you're a Prime member, go check it out. Like, for free.

And my latest writing project, GRIMM DIAGNOSIS, is swashing around right now, trying to find a home.

GRIMM DIAGNOSIS follows a modern physician as he attempts to start a medical practice in a world shaped by Grimm’s fairy tales.

After an accident strands Dr. Robert Henry Lang in a medieval land without surgical supplies, medicines or even hot running water, all he wants to do is find a way home to present-day Seattle. But Rob can’t ignore the medical needs all around him, so he begins seeing patients. Before he knows it, Rob’s services are in high demand.

He hires an office manager, Hans, who never goes anywhere without his bag of bread crumbs. He negotiates a work contract with the Fair Godmother, the leader of the town’s professional guilds. And he falls in love with his part-time bodyguard, a former hood-wearing redhead who still delivers baskets of food to forest-dwelling shut-ins.

Without meaning to, Rob makes this strange place his home. But as threats from Rob’s old world creep into this new one, he’ll be asked to make a sacrifice that could shatter not just his own life, but the lives of everyone around him as well.